Emergency services professionals, such as firefighters, police officers, EMT's and others, are commonly summoned into action by a radio communication transmitted from a central dispatch center. When an emergency arises, the call center will transmit a preselected tone sequence (hereafter referred to as “a tone”) over the airwaves, which are followed by detailed information regarding the nature of the emergency. The transmitted tones and information are received by the desired professionals, who will then contact the dispatch center to confirm their receipt of the transmission and will then respond to the emergency. This contact is often the only way that the dispatch center will know that the information has been successfully transmitted.
Because the difference of even a few minutes in responding to an emergency communication can determine whether a person is saved or dies, an unknown failure of the dispatch system can truly result in a life or death situation. When an emergency call is dispatched over an unmonitored system, the dispatchers have no indication that the system has failed and the call was not transmitted until they realize that an abnormally long period of time has elapsed without hearing back from the emergency responders. In a busy dispatch center they may not become aware of the failure for quite some time and the consequences can be very serious.
In addition to absolute failures to transmit, it is also possible for a dispatch center to accidentally alert the wrong department without knowing it. When this happens, the dispatch center must wait until the wrong department contacts the center before reinitiating the process for the correct fire department. This can also result in a serious delay in the response of the correct emergency service.
Because of the importance of the dispatch radio system to the safety of those in the coverage area of the dispatch center, an unmonitored fire dispatch radio system can adversely affect the ISO (Insurances Services Office) rating of the department, which can increase the homeowners' insurance rates in the coverage area.
Many larger dispatch centers and emergency departments use sophisticated trunked dispatch systems, which operate digitally and often have internal controls that monitor the system and ensure that it is functioning properly. Unfortunately, the high cost of trunked systems means that a very large number of dispatch centers still utilize non-trunked analog radio systems, and there are currently no commercially available products for monitoring the integrity of these systems.
Therefore, there is a need for a system that will monitor all critical operational aspects of a conventional, non-trunked, analog, radio communications base radio or repeater system and to alert the proper personal when a failure occurs, and that will monitor the paging tones that are transmitted when a department is alerted and to give a visual indication of which department was alerted so the dispatchers can verify that the proper department was paged.